


Resolution

by bamboozledone



Series: Alternate Takes [5]
Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:37:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bamboozledone/pseuds/bamboozledone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss dies, and life goes on in Panem. Part V in the 'Alternate Takes' series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Resolution

**Author's Note:**

> The Alternate Takes series posits eight alternate endings to the books, each with one major plot point changed. Basically it's a way for me to get over my desire to tear the last forty or so pages out of my 'Mockingjay' copy.
> 
> All characters are the property of Suzanne Collins, whose name I consistently think is "Susan Colin". Whoops.

Katniss burns.

 

Her mother was against it. She wanted something to bury in the ground, perhaps owing to the fact that Prim and her husband were both vaporized and she was left with nothing but a memory in her mind and a yellowed photo on the mantle. She begs and pleads until her face is red and splotchy from crying and her voice is hoarse from shouting. The committee listens until a man in a white lab coat with bifocals glasses sticks a syringe in her left arm and Mrs. Everdeen slowly sinks to the ground, heavily sedated.

 

In the end, Peeta demands it, and nobody questions his resolve in the matter.

 

The Girl on Fire deserves to go up in flames.

 

\---

 

Johanna writes.

 

She liked Katniss as well as she was capable of liking anyone, but she knows that their relationship was born of circumstance rather than choice. It’s a cold sting to the memories she had of the dark-hard girl, of the few moments after the Games where she felt like a real person again, one who could laugh and dream and envision a world where anything at all was possible.

 

There’s a picture, one that was obviously taken during the period where all of District 13 still through Katniss had some sort of Magical Powers, where she sits with Katniss and Gale and a starry-eyed Annie Cresta. Katniss is somewhere between anger and resentment, Gale appears to be happy with his arm slung low across Katniss’s waist, and Annie looks, as always, bewildered. But perhaps the most striking feature is the small smile on Johanna’s lips, curt yet sincere. Sometimes she wants to throw it away, forget that anybody in that frame ever existed, but she keeps the photograph by her bedside, a cruel reminder for the moments when she feels too content in her cushy life in District 2.

 

She starts by putting their names of the back of the photograph, to remind the future generations that she existed, that Katniss existed. All the names flow out of her pen, and she remembers their faces for just a moment before she takes another sip of her spiked coffee.

 

Later, she writes in a tattered journal about the time Finnick Odair kissed her, and when she and Haymitch went out drinking and he passed out and she laughed and took pictures of him with a camera that wasn’t hers. She writes about her brother and sister and mother, all beautiful until they were shot down in the middle of her small city. She leaves out the details of their deaths because they all deserve to be remembered as they were before their lives were taken away, before the blood and gore of the Games finally caught up with them.

 

On the last page she pastes a picture of Katniss and Peeta, smiling for an audience they both despised. Peeta is blushing and Katniss looks stunned, like somebody smashed her over the head with a tree branch. Johanna wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the truth of the matter: Katniss always had a talent for bringing the oddest types of harm on herself.

 

She leaves the space underneath the photograph blank, just writes their names and closes the journal with a dull thud. 

 

\---

 

Gale drinks.

 

At first, it’s just a little bit, to ease the constant humming in the back of his head, to drown out the mechanical sounds of District 2. Then it’s a little more, to erase the memory of Katniss’s smile when it would start drizzling during a hunting excursion. He gets to the point where he forgets more than he remembers, and he doesn’t mind so much when she comes to him in his dreams, whispering his name softly as she kisses his forehead.

 

He ups the ante a month after the Peacekeeper shot her down, and drinks until he can’t see his hands grasping the bottle in front of him. He remembers stumbling down an alley, shitfaced and unfeeling, until he reaches a familiar doorstep.

 

Johanna finds him in a wasted heap outside her apartment near midnight, half-dead and puking up blood and brown liquor and regret. She considers taking him to a hospital, but opts to lay him on her couch, a waste bin resting next to his head on the ground.

 

When he wakes up the next morning, Johanna is holding a damp washcloth to his face, smoothing back his sweaty black hair with her worn fingers. Gale immediately throws up on her, and she sighs, and continues after stripping her own vomit-stained clothes off.

 

“You gonna drink your way through life now?” she asks slowly as he peels himself off the couch cushions.

 

“Something like that,” Gale says, solemn.

 

Johanna lets him sleep in her bed that night. He shivers, his sobriety getting the best of him through the evening. Before the sun comes up, Johanna crawls into the space next to him, wrapping her arms around his midsection until he stops shaking and presses his freezing lips to her neck.

 

Gale, it seems, was never quite as strong as he pretended.

 

\---

 

Peeta smolders.

 

Haymitch wakes up one night to the smell of ash in the air thick in the air. At first, he wonders if he left the fire on in the living room, but then realizes that the smoke is coming from outside, rushing through his half-open window.

 

He forces himself to pull on a robe, and sprints down the street until he comes to Katniss’s house, which is burning merrily in the light of the full moon. Peeta is there, standing in a wave of ash, frowning as the house is consumed by flames.

 

“What the hell are you doing?” Haymitch roars, pushing Peeta further away from the house.

 

“She’s not coming back, Haymitch,” Peeta says calmly. “No need to have it around anymore, reminding us.” 

 

Peeta doesn’t even blink as he continues to throw kindling on the inferno that used to be Katniss’s home. Haymitch has to physically restrain Peeta from throwing himself into the mess as well.

 

In the aftermath of the fire, Peeta is admitted to the hospital, where he screams and shouts and throws himself against the walls until he is bloody and bruised. He doesn’t leave for many months, and, when he does, he burns his house down too.

 

He lives inside padded walls for a very long time after that, asking for a lighter whenever the nurse comes in with a handful of his medication.

 

\---

 

Annie sings.

 

Little tunes, a forgotten sea shanty, nothing in particular. Music brings her back to earth when she finds herself floating away again.

 

She and Katniss were by no means close, but Annie remembers what Finnick had said about her, how she was shouldering enough misery for the entirety of Panem. Annie wasn’t particularly lucid at that time in her life, but having a child to take care of is a sobering reality, and even Annie couldn’t bury herself in the fantasy world she had concocted to deal with her grief when she had a six-month-old screaming all night.

 

She thought briefly about naming her child Katniss, but chose not to when she saw how the child smiled and babbled happily as they sat on the beach, watching the waves roll in and out. Katniss was never that happy, no matter how much she might have tried to pretend for the cameras.

 

Annie visits Peeta in the hospital, where she watches him as he claws at the plaster on the walls with bloody fingertips. She doesn’t like to think it, but watching him so unhinged makes her feel better, like she’s somehow superior to him when they’re both so fucked up inside. She’s learned to hide it well, and she wonders if Peeta will too, someday.

 

She wants to hold him, tell him that these things in his head will hurt less as time drifts by, but the doctors have to restrain him before he can hurt her.

 

\---

 

Haymitch lives.

 

The morning after he watches Peeta get taken back to the hospital, he pours out all the liquor that he’s been hoarding until the ground stinks with it and the grass dies under the harsh chemicals. He makes a go of cleaning the house too, opening all the windows and allowing the air, laden as it is with ash, wash through the hallways.

 

A couple days a week, Haymitch starts going into town, just walking. He even musters up the ability to say hello to some of the folks he passes. For the most part, they stare, but some flush and wave back. Haymitch even buys a flock of geese to tend to the grass that’s begun to grow again in his front yard. The geese have goslings, and Haymitch tends to them like he would tend to his own children.

 

He meets a woman in the marketplace on a rainy fall afternoon. She’s Seam, but her hands are clean and her smile impossibly bright. They won’t get married (he’s too old and she’s too kind to end up with somebody so mentally broken and bruised), but she moves into his house and cooks him breakfast and tells him that she wants a child someday and they make love into the absurd hours of the night.

 

He’s happy.

 

Once and awhile, he thinks about Peeta, thinks about Katniss. Sometimes he swears he can hear the laughter of a child coming from the rank ashes that still remain, unmoved, in the places where their houses once stood.

 

He and his girl make a kid, a little boy with their Seam eyes. They name him Peeta, because it’s the only name that fits when the boy smiles.

 

Haymitch figures he owes it to her, to Katniss. He never was able to save her the second time around.


End file.
